


red 7

by uno_steel



Series: tpp prompt fills [3]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Card Games, Color Blindness, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Space Crime Family, UNO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 06:17:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19784950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uno_steel/pseuds/uno_steel
Summary: the-voifsaid“Hey u should write a fic where the space fam is playing space uno and then someone gets too excited when they have one card so they shout “JUNO” by mistake.”





	red 7

The stakes were impossibly high.

Once, he would’ve called them friends, but no longer—not after they’d betrayed him in the cruelest of ways, the bonds of their friendship warping in the heat of battle . . .

”Juno, dear, there’s no need to be so dramatic,” Nureyev murmured into his ear.

Just like that, Juno was jolted out of his thoughts. “Huh?”

”Your face, dear. It’s doing that thing it does when you’re in the middle of an internal monologue.”

Juno scowled. “I don’t make a face when I’m monologuing,” he argued, although truthfully he wasn’t sure one way or the other.

”Oh, no, Mister Steel, you definitely do,” Rita chimed in from his right.

So this is how it ends, Juno thought. Mocked to death by my loved ones.

Across the table, Buddy and Vespa were bouncing off each other’s plays, laying down reverse card after reverse card. Juno wasn’t too worried. A few minutes earlier, Vespa had drawn for an ungodly period of time, searching for either a yellow or a zero until she’d eventually drawn one that was both. Buddy, on the other hand, had far fewer cards, but she was struggling to get rid of them—Rita was infamous for her liberal usage of trick cards, and she had no mercy when she pelted Buddy with plus four after plus four.

Finally, Vespa emerged victorious. Buddy was forced to play a plain old green card in lieu of a reverse.

Juno drew in a breath. With the current order of play, sitting next to Rita as he was, it was now his turn to live in the danger zone. Thankfully, she (mostly) spared him, playing a green skip to pass his turn over.

Dejected, Juno slumped a little—he only had three cards, but he’d also had three cards for the last four turns or so—which mostly meant that he slumped further into Nureyev’s chest.

Chuckling, his boyfriend wrapped an arm around Juno’s waist and drew him in closer. Conveniently, this gave him a look at Nureyev’s cards, but Juno wasn’t going to point that out. UNO was a cutthroat game and he’d take any advantage he could get, even as Vespa, catching on, shook her head in mock disapproval from across the table.

Honestly, Juno didn’t see the harm in it. He’d already gone from a cop to a private eye to an intergalactic criminal; why shouldn’t he cheat at UNO when presented with the perfect opportunity? He was embracing the “be gay, do crimes” mentality rather well, he thought, and besides, Nureyev was as warm as a furnace and didn’t have any trick cards anyway—

Which—oh, that was a problem, huh? Jet, sitting stoic and silent to Nureyev’s left, had avoided the petty in-fighting (and subsequent non-strategic tricking that followed), and now he only had two cards left.

As Nureyev laid down a green three—by some miracle, they’d managed to stay on the same color for more than two turns—Jet met Juno’s eyes, apparently sensing his dismay. (Huh. Maybe there _was_ some merit to the claim that Juno had an expressive face.)

Jet was indisputably the most reserved out of the entire crew, but his quiet satisfaction bled through with a wry tilt to his lips as he played his second-to-last card: a red seven.

”JUNO!” Jet proclaimed triumphantly, still maintaining eye contact with the lady whose name he had just called.

There was a quick flurry of looks around the table, but no one said anything. It looked like it was up to him, as the aforementioned lady in question.

”Yeah, big guy?” Juno ventured. What did Jet think he was playing at?

”Uh, Jet,” Rita interjected then. “That ain’t the right card. Or the right thing you say when you’ve only got one card left, for that matter, so I think this is the part where you draw now?”

Jet moved to take the penalty. “I did say the wrong thing,” he admitted, slightly flushed with the mistake. “But why do you say I played the wrong card? If there is a specific card one must play to declare UNO, there is no mention of that in the rules booklet. I consulted it extensively in preparation and I’m sure there was no mention.”

”No, no, nothing of the sort,” Buddy reassured. “It’s just, well—you played a red seven after a green three. You wouldn’t happen to be colorblind, would you, Jet?”

”That would explain the car,” Juno muttered under his breath.

”If I am colorblind, I have never noticed,” Jet announced. “And, Juno, the Ruby 7 is painted perfectly in accordance with its name, if that’s what you’re digging at.”

”Is it, though?” Rita asked, nose scrunched. “I mean, generally speaking, rubies are red. Or at least they’re red on Mars and in all the streams I’ve ever seen.”

This was, as all of them knew, a formidable numbers of streams.

Jet looked slightly downtrodden now. “Imagine being a jewel thief and not even knowing that you’re colorblind.”

“Aww, that’s alright, Mister Sikuliaq! We can just draw patterns on the red and green cards so you can tell the difference between ‘em!”

“That’s . . . that would be very nice of you, Rita. Thank you.”

Vespa removed Jet’s red seven from the top of the pile and discarded it somewhere in the middle of the deck. She gave him a new card. “We all make mistakes,” she said gently. Unspoken: “Play on.”

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on tumblr @[uno-steel](https://uno-steel.tumblr.com)!


End file.
